A multi-rover cooperative team or swarm developed by Sandia National Laboratories is described, including various control methodologies that have been implemented to date. How the swarm's capabilities could be applied to a lunar ice prospecting mission is briefly explored. Some of the specific major engineering issues that must be addressed to successfully implement the swarm approach to a lunar surface mission are outlined, and potential solutions are proposed.

By producing compact representations of hyperspectral image cubes (hypercubes), image storage requirements and the amount of time it takes to extract essential elements of information can both be dramatically reduced. However, these compact representations must preserve the important spectral features within hypercube pixels and the spatial structure associated with background and objects or phenomena of interest. This paper describes a novel approach for automatically and efficiently generating a particular type of compact hypercube representation, referred to as a supercube. The hypercube is segmented into regions that contain pixels with similar spectral shapes that are spatially connected, and the pixel connectivity constraint can be relaxed. Thresholds of similarity in spectral shape between pairs of pixels are derived directly from the hypercube data. One superpixel is generated for each region as some linear combination of pixels belonging to that region. The superpixels are optimal in the sense that the linear combination coefficients are computed so as to minimize the level of noise. Each hypercube pixel is represented in the supercube by applying a gain and bias to the superpixel assigned to the region containing that pixel. Examples are provided.

High-energy cascades have been simulated in gold using molecular dynamics with a modified embedded atom method potential. The results show that both vacancy and interstitial clusters form with high probability as a result of intracascade processes. The formation of clusters has been interpreted in terms of the high pressures generated in the core of the cascade during the early stages. We provide evidence that correlation between interstitial and vacancy clustering exists.

A 'proof-of-principle' Nb{sub 3}Sn superconducting dual-bore dipole magnet was built from racetrack coils, as a first step in a program to develop an economical, 15 Tesla, accelerator-quality magnet. The mechanical design and magnet fabrication procedures are discussed. No training was required to achieve temperature-dependent plateau currents, despite several thermal cycles that involved partial magnet disassembly and substantial pre-load variations. Subsequent magnets are expected to approach 15 Tesla with substantially improved conductor.

To identify genes misregulated in the final stages of breast carcinogenesis, we performed differential display to compare the gene expression patterns of the human tumorigenic mammary epithelial cells, HMT-3522-T4-2, with those of their immediate premalignant progenitors, HMT-3522-S2. We identified a novel gene, called anti-zuai-1 (AZU-1), that was abundantly expressed in non- and premalignant cells and tissues but was appreciably reduced in breast tumor cell types and in primary tumors. The AZU-1 gene encodes an acidic 571-amino-acid protein containing at least two structurally distinct domains with potential protein-binding functions: an N-terminal serine and proline-rich domain with a predicted immunoglobulin-like fold and a C-terminal coiled-coil domain. In HMT-3522 cells, the bulk of AZU-1 protein resided in a detergent-extractable cytoplasmic pool and was present at much lower levels in tumorigenic T4-2 cells than in their nonmalignant counterparts. Reversion of the tumorigenic phenotype of T4-2 cells, by means described previously, was accompanied by the up-regulation of AZU-1. In addition, reexpression of AZU-1 in T4-2 cells, using viral vectors, was sufficient to reduce their malignant phenotype substantially, both in culture and in vivo. These results indicate that AZU-1 is a candidate breast tumor suppressor that may exert its effects by promoting correct tissue morphogenesis.

We point out that for solar neutrino oscillations with the mass-squared difference of Delta m^2 ~;; 10^-10 - 10^-9 eV^2, traditionally known as"vacuum oscillation'' range, the solar matter effects are non-negligible, particularly for the low energy pp neutrinos. One consequence of this is that the values of the mixing angle theta and pi/2-theta are not equivalent, leading to the need to consider the entire physical range of the mixing angle 0<=theta<=pi/2 when determining the allowed values of the neutrino oscillation parameters.

This paper describes the use of commercial quantum chemistrycodes to simu-late several critical scintillation processes. The crystalis modeled as a cluster of typically 50 atoms embedded in an array oftypically 5,000 point charges designed to reproduce the electrostaticfield of the infinite crystal. The Schrodinger equation is solved for theground, ionized, and excited states of the system to determine the energyand electron wavefunction. Computational methods for the followingcritical processes are described: (1) the formation and diffusion ofrelaxed holes, (2) the formation of excitons, (3) the trapping ofelectrons and holes by activator atoms, (4) the excitation of activatoratoms, and (5) thermal quenching. Examples include hole diffusion in CsI,the exciton in CsI, the excited state of CsI:Tl, the energy barrier forthe diffusion of relaxed holes in CaF2 and PbF2, and prompt hole trappingby activator atoms in CaF2:Eu and CdS:Te leading to an ultra-fast (<50ps) scintillation risetime.

The generation of ultra-short x-rays by Thomson scattering intense laser pulses from electron beams is discussed, including recent experimental results and methods for enhancing the x-ray flux. A high flux of x-rays in a femtosecond pulse requires the generation of femtosecond electron bunches and a head-on Thomson scattering geometry. The generation of ultrashort electron bunches in a plasma-based accelerator with an injection technique that uses two colliding laser pulses is discussed. Simulations indicate the bunches as short as a few fs can be produced. Conversion of the fs electron pulse to a fs x-ray pulse can be accomplished by Bremsstrahlung or Thomson scattering.

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Dissociation behavior of carboneous materials with or without fluorine atoms at pressures (P) of tens of gigapascal (GPa) and temperature (T) at several thousand Kelvin is not so well understood. The main issues are: (a) carbon condensation processes and (b) thermodynamics of hydrogen fluoride (HF) produced from dissociation. Item (a) requires information on (i) the melting line of carbon, (ii) liquid carbon, (iii) stability and energy barrier between graphite and diamond clusters, and (iv) kinetics of cluster growth. Item (b) requires knowledge of (v) intermolecular potentials involving HF and (vi) influence of fluorine chemistry on supercritical phase change. The details concerning these issues are described.

The effective I/O bandwidth benchmark (b{_}eff{_}io) covers two goals: (1) to achieve a characteristic average number for the I/O bandwidth achievable with parallel MPI-I/O applications, and (2) to get detailed information about several access patterns and buffer lengths. The benchmark examines ''first write'', ''rewrite'' and ''read'' access, strided (individual and shared pointers) and segmented collective patterns on one file per application and non-collective access to one file per process. The number of parallel accessing processes is also varied and well-formed I/O is compared with non-well formed. On systems, meeting the rule that the total memory can be written to disk in 10 minutes, the benchmark should not need more than 15 minutes for a first pass of all patterns. The benchmark is designed analogously to the effective bandwidth benchmark for message passing (b{_}eff) that characterizes the message passing capabilities of a system in a few minutes. First results of the b{_}eff{_}io benchmark are given for IBM SP and Cray T3E systems and compared with existing benchmarks based on parallel Posix-I/O.

In May 1998 the Hanford Site started developing a program for characterization of transuranic (TRU) waste for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. After less than two years, Hanford will have a program certified by the Carlsbad Area Office (CAO). By picking a simple waste stream, taking advantage of lessons learned at the other sites, as well as communicating effectively with the CAO, Hanford was able to achieve certification in record time. This effort was further simplified by having a centralized program centered on the Waste Receiving and Processing (WRAP) Facility that contains most of the equipment required to characterize TRU waste. The use of fixed facilities for the characterization of TRU waste at sites with a long-term clean-up mission can be cost effective for several reasons. These include the ability to control the environment in which sensitive instrumentation is required to operate and ensuring that calibrations and maintenance activities are scheduled and performed as an operating routine. Other factors contributing to cost effectiveness include providing approved procedures and facilities for handling hazardous materials and anticipated contingencies and performing essential evolutions, and regulating and smoothing the work load and environmental conditions to provide maximal efficiency …

Solubility data for ammonia in water and various dilute solutions are abundant in the literature. However, there is a noticeable lack of ammonia solubility data for high salt, basic solutions of various mixtures of salts including those found in many of the Hanford Washington underground waste tanks. As a result, models based on solubility data for dilute salt solutions have been used to extrapolate to high salt solutions. These significant extrapolations need to be checked against actual laboratory data. Some indirect vapor measurements have been made. A more direct approach is to determine the ratio of solubility of ammonia in water to its solubility in high salt solutions. In various experiments, pairs of solutions, one of which is water and the other a high salt solution, are allowed to come to equilibrium with a common ammonia vapor pressure. The ratio of concentrations of ammonia in the two solutions is equal to the ratio of the respective ammonia solubilities (Henry's Law constants) at a given temperature. This information can then be used to refine the models that predict vapor space compositions of ammonia. Ammonia at Hanford is of concern because of its toxicity in the environment and its contribution to the …

Development of the DOE Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) web site is the result of the efforts of marry members of the Nuclear Criticality Safety (NCS) community and is maintained by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under the direction of the NCSP Management Team. This World Wide Web (WWW) resource was developed as part of the DOE response to the DNFSB Recommendation 97-2, which reflected the need to make criticality safety information available to a wide audience. The NCSP web site provides information of interest to NCS professionals and includes links to other sites actively involved in the collection and dissemination of criticality safety information. To the extent possible, the hyperlinks on this web site direct the user to the original source of the referenced material in order to ensure access to the latest, most accurate version.

We present a new technique for progressive approximation and compression of polygonal objects in images. Our technique uses local parameterizations defined by meshes of convex polygons in the plane. We generalize a tensor product wavelet transform to polygonal domains to perform multiresolution analysis and compression of image regions. The advantage of our technique over conventional wavelet methods is that the domain is an arbitrary tessellation rather than, for example, a uniform rectilinear grid. We expect that this technique has many applications image compression, progressive transmission, radiosity, virtual reality, and image morphing.

There is a well-known story about the blind man examining the elephant: the part of the elephant examined determines his perception of the whole beast. Perhaps bioinformatics--the shotgun marriage between biology and mathematics, computer science, and engineering--is like an elephant that occupies a large chair in the scientific living room. Given the demand for and shortage of researchers with the computer skills to handle large volumes of biological data, where exactly does the bioinformatics elephant sit? There are probably many biologists who feel that a major product of this bioinformatics elephant is large piles of waste material. If you have tried to plow through Web sites and software packages in search of a specific tool for analyzing and collating large amounts of research data, you may well feel the same way. But there has been progress with major initiatives to develop more computing power, educate biologists about computers, increase funding, and set standards. For our purposes, bioinformatics is not simply a biologically inclined rehash of information theory (1) nor is it a hodgepodge of computer science techniques for building, updating, and accessing biological data. Rather bioinformatics incorporates both of these capabilities into a broad interdisciplinary science that involves both conceptual …

Turbulent combustion fields established by detonative explosions of TNT in confinements of different sizes are studied by high-resolution numerical simulation, using AMR (Adaptive Mesh Refinement) method. The chambers are filled with nitrogen or air at NPT conditions. In the second case, the detonation products, rich in C and CO, act, upon turbulent mixing with air, as fuel in an exothermic process of combustion, manifested by a distinct pressure rise. It is the evolution in space and time of this dynamic process that formed the principal focus of this study. Our results demonstrate a dominating influence of the size of the enclosure on the burning rate--an effect that cannot be expressed in terms of the classical burning speed. Under such circumstances, combustion is of considerable significance, since it is associated with a calorific value (''heat release'') of an order of 3500 Cal/gm, as compared to 1100 Cal/gm of TNT detonation. The numerical simulations provide considerable insight into the evolution of combustion fields dominated by shock-turbulence interactions. Fuel consumption histories, extracted from the simulations, reveal the dynamic features of the system, represented by the rate of combustion (akin to velocity) and its change (akin to acceleration). Time profiles of the mass fraction …

Reliably processing, imaging, and interpreting seismic data from areas with complicated structures, such as sub-salt, requires a thorough understanding of elastic as well as acoustic wave propagation. Elastic numerical modeling is an essential tool to develop that understanding. While 2-D elastic modeling is in common use, 3-D elastic modeling has been too computationally intensive to be used routinely. Recent advances in computing hardware, including commodity-based hardware, have substantially reduced computing costs. These advances are making 3-D elastic numerical modeling more feasible. A series of example 3-D elastic calculations were performed using a complicated structure, the SEG/EAGE salt structure. The synthetic traces show that the effects of shear wave propagation can be important for imaging and interpretation of images, and also for AVO and other applications that rely on trace amplitudes. Additional calculations are needed to better identify and understand the complex wave propagation effects produced in complicated structures, such as the SEG/EAGE salt structure.

The major consumer electronics in U.S. homes accounted for nearly 7 percent of U.S. residential electricity consumption in 1999. We attribute more than half of this figure (3.6 percent) to televisions, videocassette recorders, and DVD players, and nearly one-third (1.8 percent) to audio products. Set-top boxes currently account for a relatively small fraction of residential electricity use (0.7 percent), but we expect this end-use to grow quickly with the proliferation of digital set-top boxes, which currently use 40 percent more energy per unit than the average TV set. In all, these consumer electronics plus telephone products consumed 75 TWh in the U.S. in 1999, half of which was consumed while the products were not in use. This energy use is expected to grow as products with new or advanced functionality hit the market.

This multidisciplinary team approach to waste container handling, developed within the Grassroots Ergonomics process, presents participatory ergonomic interpretations of quantitative and qualitative aspects of this process resulting in a peer developed training. The lower back, shoulders, and wrists were identified as frequently injured areas, so these working postures were a primary focus for the creation of the workers' training. Handling procedures were analyzed by the team to identify common cycles involving one 5 gallon (60 pounds), two 5 gallons (60 and 54 pounds), 30 gallon (216 pounds), and 55 gallon (482 pounds) containers: lowering from transporting to/from transport vehicles, loading/unloading on transport vehicles, and loading onto pallet. Eleven experienced waste container handlers participated in this field analysis. Ergonomic exposure assessment tools measuring these field activities included posture analysis, posture targeting, Lumbar Motion Monitor{trademark} (LMM), and surface electromyography (sEMG) for the erector spinae, infraspinatus, and upper trapezius muscles. Posture analysis indicates that waste container handlers maintained non-neutral lower back postures (flexion, lateral bending, and rotation) for a mean of 51.7% of the time across all activities. The right wrist was in non-neutral postures (radial, ulnar, extension, and flexion) a mean of 30.5% of the time and the left wrist 31.4%. Non-neutral …

The Engineering Test Stand (ETS) is an EUV laboratory lithography tool. The purpose of the ETS is to demonstrate EUV full-field imaging and provide data required to support production-tool development. The ETS is configured to separate the imaging system and stages from the illumination system. Environmental conditions can be controlled independently in the two modules to maximize EUV throughput and environmental control. A source of 13.4 nm radiation is provided by a laser plasma source in which a YAG laser beam is focused onto a xenon-cluster target. A condenser system, comprised of multilayer-coated mirrors and grazing-incidence mirrors, collects the EUV radiation and directs it onto a-reflecting reticle. A four-mirror, ring-field optical system, having a numerical aperture of 0.1, projects a 4x-reduction image onto the wafer plane. This design corresponds to a resolution of 70nm at a k{sub 1} of 0.52. The ETS is designed to produce full-field images in step: and-scan mode using vacuum-compatible, one-dimension-long-travel magnetically levitated stages for both reticle and wafer. Reticle protection is incorporated into the ETS design. This paper provides a system overview of the ETS design and specifications.

Implementation of a new DOE Order at a complex site like Hanford is not as simple as just stating that the Order is to be followed. There are contractual changes, interface adjustments and institutional obstacles to overcome that all must be properly analyzed and dealt with before the actual physical changes embodied in the new requirements can be put into practice. In planning for these changes associated with the new DOE 0 435.1 ''Radioactive Waste Management'', the Richland Operations Office (RL) of the U.S. Department of Energy is attempting to make an orderly and efficient transition to the new Order requirements. In so doing, RL is tasking the Management and Integration contractor for the Project Hanford Management Contract (PHMC) held by Fluor Daniel Hanford (FDH) to coordinate the planning and integration efforts necessary to ensure that resources needed to implement the new requirements are identified and plans for implementation completed within the first year after issuance of the Order. Implementation at Hanford is complicated not only by the relatively complex contract situation with the PHMC under FDH and its major subcontractors, the Environmental Remediation Contract (under Bechtel), and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (run by Battelle), but also by the …

At least two distinct kinds of hydrogeochemical models have evolved historically for use in analyzing contaminant transport, but each has important limitations. One kind, focusing on organic contaminants, treats biodegradation reactions as parts of relatively simple kinetic reaction networks with no or limited coupling to aqueous and surface complexation and mineral dissolution/precipitation reactions. A second kind, evolving out of the speciation and reaction path codes, is capable of handling a comprehensive suite of multicomponent complexation (aqueous and surface) and mineral precipitation and dissolution reactions, but has not been able to treat reaction networks characterized by partial redox disequilibrium and multiple kinetic pathways. More recently, various investigators have begun to consider biodegradation reactions in the context of comprehensive equilibrium and kinetic reaction networks (e.g. Hunter et al. 1998, Mayer 1999). Here we explore two examples of multiple equilibrium and kinetic reaction pathways using the reactive transport code GIMRT98 (Steefel, in prep.): (1) a computational example involving the generation of acid mine drainage due to oxidation of pyrite, and (2) a computational/field example where the rates of chlorinated VOC degradation are linked to the rates of major redox processes occurring in organic-rich wetland sediments overlying a contaminated aerobic aquifer.

Accelerating site cleanup to reduce facility risks to the workers, the public and the environment during a time of declining federal budgets represents a significant technical and economic challenge to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Operations Offices and their respective contractors. A significant portion of a facility's recurring annual expenses are associated with routine, long-term surveillance and maintenance (S&amp;M) activities. However, ongoing S&amp;M activities do nothing to reduce risks and basically spend money that could be reallocated towards facility deactivation. This paper discusses the background around DOE efforts to reduce surveillance and maintenance costs, one approach used to perform cost reviews, lessons learned from field implementation and what assistance is available to assist DOE sites in performing these evaluations.